My first OC

[Burgies]

Hi guys,
I am new to overclocking, and have read through many of the posts and links that have been posted here but im still hesitant about what I am actually meant to do. My system is listed in my signature. I know with the cooler I have i cant push too far. I was hoping for 4.2 or 4.4.
So should I be doing stuff in the bios, or with Asrock Extreme Tuner? And what do I need to do exactly?

Thanks - Burgies.

 

[inzone]

There are two options for you and the first one is the easy one and that is most of the motherboards that are good with overclocking will have a set of preset overclock options for those who just want a mild overclock and don't want to spend a lot of time on it. If you go into the bios in the advanced or extreme section whichever Asrock calls it you will see an option that may be called cpu leel up or cpu overclock. I don't have an Asrock board I have an Asus board and in my board it's called cpu level up. What it is essentually is a set of preset overclock settings that you can choose from and they may be something like 4.0ghz , 4.2 ghz and 4.4 ghz, when you choose one the bios will make the necessary changes that are recorded in the OC file and all you have to do is save and exit and your cpu is overclocked.
The other way is to make the changes yourself and testing those changes and going back and forth between Windows and the bios doing this but it's the way to do it and you have to have a lot of patience and time and in the end you have an overclock done the right way.
I would not use any Windows program to do any overclocking , Windows can't even read the correct overclock when an overclock is done in the bios. Stay away from those programs.

 

[Burgies]

Ill check for preset OCs, whats the best way to make sure its stable?

 

[inzone]

If you take one of those presets you should be stable because those are tested by the board maker. Testing stability can be done a number of ways a good game like BF3 will do or you can download some free programs like Prime 95 or 3DMark or Pc Mark from FutureMark. You can Google for stress testing and come up with a slew of programs.

 

[Burgies]

I found the preset ones, and now running at 4.2 Will run 3dmark now and compare to my last one, thanks for your advice mate

 

[Burgies]

Best answer selected by burgies.